Constellation of Wings offers a glimpse into the world of a speaker fractured by early childhood separation and displacement. An unknown mother figure, a lost love, and a detached memory of the self all appear in the poetry collection as counterpoints to the speaker of these poems. Poems draw from the Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Piaget’s stages of development, and Freudian psychoanalysis to guide the reader through an emotional journey in which redemption is often found through connection to place and observations of the natural world.
Advance Praise:
Constellation of Wings begins with a birthmark that tethers a body to its lost motherland. From there, Kathryne Lim’s remarkable debut collection vividly and viscerally conjures bodies contending with their abandonments, distances, diagnoses, and pleasures. With intense observation and empathy, we are led into the hidden and visible longings of a daughter, adoptee, lover, seeker, social worker—tenderly guided by a speaker who holds for us a mirror of truths, distortions, and fierce desires. We will hear these poems long after putting down their pages, resonating with the beauty and loss of the voice who “will carry the broken / chords inside my body forever. // The music of ivory keys / locked in song.”
Melody S. Gee, author of Each Crumbling House and The Dead in Daylight
Reading Constellation of Wings, one is immediately drawn in by Kathryne Lim’s finely wrought language and the deftness with which she presents her inner life. Throughout the book, Lim navigates issues of belonging and loss with penetrating intelligence and emotional precision. Over and over, she returns to questions of object permanence: Does a mother we are unable to see still exist? Does a lover we have left behind still exist? What does it mean to be defined by relationships and histories that live on in the mind as mere palimpsests? Lim’s questions are rooted in the soil of the Desert Southwest, a landscape she renders with tender honesty, in ways that push against cliché. Encountering these poems, readers will find themselves in the presence of a truly masterful poet, a writer certain to honor us with much more to come.
Dara Yen Elerath, author of Dark Braid
Order:
Kathryne Lim 